Dead & Company launched its 24-date Dead Forever residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere in eye-popping vogue Thursday night time, utilizing the technological marvel to each have a good time the band’s almost 60-year historical past and prolong its legacy as certainly one of rock’s most audacious dwell acts.

You can see photographs, fan-shot video and the entire set record from the present beneath.

The 200-minute, 19-song present kickstarted the third dwell engagement and second multi-weekend residency at Sphere, which shares an proprietor (James Dolan) with favourite Grateful Dead/Dead & Company tour cease, Madison Square Garden. Last 12 months, Dead & Company completed its tenth and last tour at Oracle Park within the band’s dwelling turf of San Francisco. However, it publicly maintained that future performances have been nonetheless attainable, opening the door for the two-month Las Vegas stint. After an preliminary 18 Sphere dates offered nicely — although not offered out, which explains the provision of tickets underneath face worth on secondary sale websites — the band added six extra, for a complete of eight three-day weekends by July.

The sextet — boasting two longtime Grateful Dead members, guitarist/vocalist Bob Weir and drummer Mickey Hart — made great use of Sphere’s 160,000-square-foot inside display screen and the band’s iconography all through all the present. It appeared that D&C’s visible content material creators have been closely impressed by how Sphere’s first resident act, U2, used large-scale pictures and video to make the viewers really feel it was outdoors the venue. A gaggle of well-known Dead characters — the colourful dancing bears, the terrapins, the cranium and roses — popped up in a number of numbers, probably the most vibrant being Uncle Sam Skeleton joyriding by a technicolor valley throughout “Hell in a Bucket.”

In what could have been the present’s largest second — and after opener “Feel Like a Stranger” was visually complemented with a scaffolded digital pores and skin that made Sphere seem nonetheless underneath building — the display screen house behind the stage parted to disclose the band’s authentic San Francisco home within the Haight Ashbury district. As D&C performed “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo,” the venue appeared to “lift” over the home and above the Bay Area, till the band and viewers have been amongst stars in house. Dead & Company would return to the house motif just a few occasions, predictably throughout Mickey Hart’s conventional solo quantity “Space,” and towards the top throughout a canopy of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” when the “Mississippi Half-Step” creative sequence was performed in reverse, bringing everybody again to the Grateful Dead home.

Watch Dead & Company Perform on the Sphere

While the gang shuffled in place whereas craning their necks to get as a lot of the large display screen into their line of sight, the band held a largely easygoing groove — thanks largely to bassist Oteil Burbridge — earlier than and through its exploratory jams. Weir and lead guitarist John Mayer traded off vocals whereas additionally layering melodic instrumental thrives with keyboardist and longtime Weir bandmate Jeff Chimenti. On the rear risers, Hart stored time with fellow percussionist Jay Lane, who changed authentic Grateful Dead skinsman Bill Kreutzmann in 2023.

At the residency’s announcement, the musicians promised to carry out distinctive set lists for every of the three weekend reveals, per longtime band observe. What stays to be seen — a minimum of till subsequent weekend — is whether or not D&C change up these set lists for subsequent weekends.

Dead followers have a various surfeit of ancillary reveals and actions to get pleasure from all through Las Vegas’ vacationer hall throughout all the residency, together with late-night reveals by different acts, two totally different out of doors “Shakedown Street” marketplaces, a big Dead-centric exhibition contained in the Venetian hotel-casino, and even a nightly pre-party at one of many metropolis’s new hashish consumption lounges, Smoke and Mirrors.

As for the Sphere, no forthcoming performers have been formally introduced, although information reviews declare the Eagles will develop into fall/winter residents, and nation celebrity Zac Brown all however introduced on comic Theo Von’s podcast earlier this week that he’s bought a Sphere residency lined up for 2025.

Watch Dead & Company Perform on the Sphere

Mike Prevatt is a producer and author for Nevada Public Radio in Las Vegas.

Dead & Company, Las Vegas Sphere, May 16, 2024 Set List

1. “Feel Like a Stranger”
2. “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo”
3. “Jack Straw”
4. “Bird Song”
5. “Me and My Uncle”
6. “Brown-Eyed Woman”
7. “Cold Rain and Snow”
8. “Uncle John’s Band”
9. “Help on the Way”
10. “Slipknot!”
11. “Franklin’s Tower”
12. “He’s Gone”
13. “Drums”
14. “Space”
15. “Standing on the Moon”
16. “St. Stephen”
17. “Hell in a Bucket”
18. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
19. “Not Fade Away”

Watch Dead & Company Perform ‘Hell in a Bucket’